My elder brother and my father have had a beef for as long as I can remember. There are four of us, two girls and two boys. My father spent most of his time fighting with my elder brother. I remember one day when he refused to give my brother money for food because he was rushing to leave the house for school. Before letting him go, he slapped him across the face. He didn’t even give him the money.

It was through the kindness of a friend from church that my elder brother was able to complete senior high school. Rather than continuing to school too, he had to go and learn a trade.

I am not trying to say my father never catered for us at all. He did contribute to some things. At least, he took care of the electricity bills. As for the water bills, my mother usually paid them because she used water for her business.

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But this man easily gets angry over the smallest things. When he is angry, he beats my mother and insults her. It applied to us, his children, too.

My mom would threaten to leave. The next day, there would be a delegation from my father’s side coming to plead his case, with the normal anthem: “What about the children? Do you want someone else to come and maltreat them?”

That always did the trick on my mother. She would stay. She had the same experience growing up. She grew up without a father, and said she didn’t want to deprive us of growing up in a two-parent home.

For me, I completed tertiary education because of my elder brother. He took me up and made sure I finished well. I went to tell my father the news, happy and excited when I gained admission, but he looked at me like it was some old news. During my years in school, when my brother couldn’t come through for me, I would call my father, and he would send excuses my way. On rare occasions, he would send me GH¢120 for a week.

When school was on vacation, I would follow my uncle to site and work so that I could pay for my fees or other expenses when preparing to go to school. One time, I even had to use that money to pay for my younger sister’s fees because my father wasn’t coming through, and things were down on both my mom’s and brother’s side.

It is not as if my father was poor. He owned a three-room house and a chamber and hall with a bathroom, which he had given out for rent.

“Why is he doing this to us? Why are we not Daddy’s children? What’s wrong? Did we wrong him?”

It was even hard to understand why he was treating us like that when you consider the fact that he is a church elder, a respected one at that, in a big church in Ghana. This was the same man who bought new clothes for himself and shoes for himself every two weeks.

Today, as I write this, life is better than it was. My elder brother has taken over the catering for the house. My mother has moved to the village to try and start something again. I currently live with my elder brother while doing my national service.

And this is where my main problem begins.

My father is no longer the man he used to be about 15 years ago. He is not entirely weak, but he now has health problems and mostly stays at home. You would think that after everything that has happened, he would understand why things are the way they are.

But no. He has been telling almost everyone he meets that his two eldest children, my elder brother and me, have not come to check on him since he became sick. He has been complaining bitterly to his sisters about us. As a result, his elder sister recently came to complain to the woman we live with in our neighbourhood about how we have supposedly abandoned our father.

Just last week, my brother and I went to see him. Do you know what happened? The man did not even look at us. He turned the other way, continued looking at his book, and barely spoke to us.

Yet he has been going around telling people that we have ignored him. That is why I have told the woman we live with not to pay attention to anyone who comes to make these complaints.

It is not as though we have abandoned him. My elder brother even paid a GH¢10,000 loan on his behalf. Had it not been for my brother, my father could have been arrested over that matter.

And this is the same man who put my brother through so much while he was growing up.

From what our neighbour has told us, it seems some of these complaints are about us not sending him money. As for me, I am not even working yet, so I do not understand where these expectations are coming from. This was one of the reasons my mom left for her hometown. There were too many complaints from people saying that we were not taking care of our father. The complaints became too much, and it eventually got to the point where she decided to leave.

There is honestly a lot more to this story, but I will stop here.

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My question is this: If you were in my position or my elder brother’s position, what would you do?

Would you continue trying to support a father who has treated you and your mother this way? Would you ignore what people are saying and simply protect your peace? Or do you think we still have a responsibility to do more for him because he is our father? I genuinely need your counsel. What would you do if you were in our shoes?

—Ekow

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